26. Chapter 7
Flux: New Boundaries and Backslides as Part of Transformation
*This book was set the be published by the publisher of my first book, but after years of struggle and many other reasons, I decided to release it on Substack instead. Each week, the 52,000 word book which was tentatively titled “Be A Force” will be dropped here online. The sections will start with number 1 and then progress over the 52 weeks of the next year. The Chapter title will be placed in the post description for clarity.
In retrospect, if I could speak to my early-thirties self, I would embrace her tightly, tell her she was safe and that once she aligned herself, really connected with her true self, she would never betray her brilliance again. How many of us have been on the brink of such moments and given into our base instincts? As someone who had issues with love and connection, I was cognizant that returning to old patterns could cost me years of progress. YEARS! Like being at the end of a horror movie escaping a serial killer and being yanked back into the house. This phase of being in flux on the way to your transformation is what I want to discuss in this chapter. The tenuous push and pull between the less powerful version of you.
However all those years ago experiencing that shame shower at Clarke Quay, I wasn’t quite aware of any of this. I shook my head and answered to my cousin on the phone in painful sobs, “I don’t know.” I had been working on air on late night radio, put out to pasture on the least desirable shift as woman in her 30s, no longer in her entertainment-industry prime, and out of nowhere, a Dutch guy had asked me to meet with him and two of his best friends who were in town from the Netherlands. He had sent me the location and it was a place I would never go, some sort of ping pong bar. Literally. Again, I ignored the fact that my intuition was pinging off and that my love addiction was compelling me to do something I didn’t need to do. This is what happens when we are disconnected. Our body is sending us somatic responses and we just ignore them. I now know I wasn’t the girl who wanted to play ping pong and drink beer and that this didn’t make me feel safe or seen, so I would now take aligned action on that and not go. I was and am the type of person who wants to have deep conversations in places where I can be heard.
When I arrived, I was already resentful of myself. The venue was loud and full of people who were very young, and when I tried to make conversation the music was too loud. This guy and his friends were almost seven feet tall, making conversation almost impossible. They eyed me like dirt, like so many European men tend to do when freshly in Singapore. Dirt or meat. Neither option particularly human. I had never felt more unseen. They didn’t even bother to say hello. It was so bizarre. I turned to my “date” and said, “Why on earth did you invite me here? Why did you think I would enjoy this?”
The version of me now would have turned long before to say I was heading to the toilet and taken some deep breaths, come out and excused myself. Or better, I would never go to something like this at all. He was not at fault. I had betrayed myself my connection to myself. I had given into this toxic cycle of attachment I was handed at birth, the one that said I was not good enough, not worthy of being seen and the one that said my needs should be ignored. Sometimes our needs are so well ignored in childhood that we learn to continue glossing over them long into adulthood. Even though all the signs pointed to this experience being familiar,
As you can well imagine from any experience of spending time in a place you would rather not be with people you don’t actually respect, it was all a disaster. I have found at the times when our sense of self is most fragile, our ego becomes huge. I learnt more about this as part of the Authentic Relating practice, this idea of posturing to cover the lower integration of self. So being greeted like I did not exist, triggered my ego, and I became enraged. I ran out of the bar into the grotty stairwell, my nervous system overwhelmed. “Where are you going?” He asked. I could barely breathe. “Your friends were so rude to me! Why would you think I would like this place?” I repeated. He replied with a shrug. The shrug of a person so simple and unperceiving of the internal torment of others, it repulsed me further. I felt shame for the thought, knowing also that it wasn’t him that was to blame. My relationship with myself was growing and I could not go backwards into unawareness. This interaction was a gift. Arriving back at the little studio I was renting at the time, I exhaled and made a new contract with myself that I would not emerge again until I had fully learned to listen to my boundaries.
